New month, New Horizons!

Oct 10, 2016

The beginning of this month has been a quite important mark for diversophy® team and our partner, JAMK University of Applied Sciences. As you might recall, on 3rd of October, the first 100 cards from our Migration & Acculturation (under development) deck have been officially launched.

With this release, these 100 cards will belong to an officially available and accessible cultural card game (a Non-for-Profit product), with the logo: New Horizons – At Home Together in Finland.

New Horizons is a product, produced from the project with JAMK University of Applied Sciences in Finland. Even though the game content is a part of Migrant Acculturation deck presented on diversophy® website, New Horizons will be likely not replaced Migration & Acculturation. The reason behind this is because our team have been honoured to receive more interests from other stakeholders during summer months. At the time being, Migration & Acculturation deck remains a deck under development, and we still welcome any possible partnerships. It will depend on each stakeholder to discuss with us their visions of distributing the cards they create.

Our Associate Director of Development, Laura Kortelainen; and our Founder & Editor in Chief, Dr. George Simons, have particularly spent intense time with the team over in Jyväskylä, Finland, in order to make this happen. One of the themes for Cross Cultural Management class of senior lecturer Steve Crawford this fall, is to train the students to become facilitators of the game themselves. George Simons is now currently in Finland, together with Elmer Dixon. The first facilitation training will start on Thursday, 6th of October.

Testing of the produced content confirmed that playing the game in small groups with the aid of facilitation helps to create enduring empathetic connections between members of distinct cultural and ethnic groups to build cultural bridges between refugees, immigrants, visitors, foreign students and host citizens in Finland. The facilitator guides the players through the game and leads a debriefing session to help players to reflect on their experience, identify “take always,” and nurture sustainable relationships that will continue long after the play session has ended. – An excerpt from the official JUfR Program Profile. I still encourage you to read it if you have not (just click onto the hyperlink) , it provides you all the basic information about this cooperation and New Horizons cultural game.

Besides, New Horizons now has its own Facebook page. You should definitely like New Horizons Facebook page, to receive first-hand updates and access freely to this NGO product. Here, on our website, there were previous news and blogs about this project you can also read, by pasting these titles into Searching.

Global Crisis. Local Response

Different backgrounds but one shared goal

A class with a first class project

The Gift of Tongues

If a single drop falls into the ocean, it creates ripples

Together with the free game content, the team would also like to keep in touch with you along your experience journey with New Horizons. You are always welcome to contact New Horizons or diversophy®, for any queries or consultation of using the game in most effective way.

Don't forget to go to Educate tab on this website to access to all necessary information you need to use diversophy® in your training sessions.